Back in May, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government published an interesting little study of media dishonesty. It examined how four major newspapers — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today — have covered the topic of waterboarding over time.
The study didn’t make much of a splash at the time, but it has suddenly hit the liberal blog circuit this week.
The contrast between how waterboarding was covered before the Bush administration embraced it as official policy, and after, is not at all unexpected, but pretty stark, nevertheless (pdf):
From the early 1930’s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
In a statement to Michael Calderone of Yahoo! News, The New York Times was moved to defend its waterboarding coverage practices thusly:
A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading.”
However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”
The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that’s what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”
Perhaps in gratitude for that fine statement, Michael Calderone was inspired to whitewash the NYT‘s whitewashing of torture with this fine piece of journalistic commentary:
Clearly, the Times doesn’t want to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate. That’s understandable, given traditional journalistic values aiming for neutrality and balance. But by not calling waterboarding torture — even though it is, and the paper itself defined it that way in the past — the Times created a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.
So, all the NYT guilty of is “a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives”, which may be mildly deplorable but is perfectly understandable, especially since it was clearly motivated by the lofty and high-minded desire not “to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate”?
That’s called taking the NYT‘s minima culpa, and becoming its water-carrying poster child.
Someone not inclined to curry favor with the NYT might say that “by not calling waterboarding torture, even though it is”, the NYT very clearly did, to its everlasting shame, put its big fat thumb on the scale in the torture debate. On the side of whitewashing the practice thereof by the President of these here United States.
But, of course, saying stuff like that doesn’t do a whole lot for your future job prospects at the NYT.
And who can blame someone who is currently employed by Yahoo! News for nursing dreams of perhaps moving to the NYT one day?
(Michael Calderone’s byline describes him as “the media reporter for Yahoo! News“. But there is, of course, an inherent conflict of interest when a reporter who wants to remain in the reporting business covers a story like this one.)